Dr. Radway is most generously read by Melissa Sarno

You know that part in the magnificent Gail Caldwell memoir Let's Take the Long Way Home, in which Gail is reflecting on an early juncture in her friendship with the writer Caroline Knapp? Gail, the older, more established writer, has been engaged with Caroline's work. Caroline has asked for Gail to read; Caroline has asked for Gail's opinion; Gail has reliably responded.

Caroline, however, has never said a word about the work Gail has done, and the vulnerability of not knowing, the inequality of the playing field, has begun to rub away at Gail. Finally Gail asks, "I have to ask you something difficult—I need to know what you think about my work." Caroline, fortunately, is right there with a reassuring, loving answer.

Melissa Sarno, a young woman I met at a BEA exhibit years ago, a young woman whose writing impresses not just me, but her many blog fans and her brand new agent (wait until you someday read Melissa's Coney Island novel), is one of those people who has never left me wondering. She has, indeed, been a most generous, and perceptive, reader of my work, and I will be forever grateful.

Last evening, late, Melissa wrote to tell me that she had read a book she knows means the world to me, a book with a quiet release, a book I still have high hopes for—Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent. Melissa read and took the time to post these words about the book on her fabulous blog, and to share her favorite paragraph. A few lines from Melissa's blog here, below. I am moved, as a friend and a writer, by the whole.

Thank you so much, Melissa Sarno.

That is what I love, love, love about this book.  The fullness and richness of this writhing adventure. Each sentence swells with the endurance of characters that are, in many ways, running on empty, past empty, but with their hearts bursting full at their worn seams.

Read more...

Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent: Introducing William and Career (an excerpt)

There was no arguing with her. There was nothing. He’d carried her back up those steps, like an empty dress in his arms. Had taken his place in the chair beside the bed and was half asleep when he heard the knock on the front door.

“Coming!” he’d called out.

Then, to his Ma, he’d whispered, “That’ll be Career.”

He’d pulled on a pair of Francis’s trousers, belted up, checked the pockets, and found a chip of coal that Francis must have tucked away after a day of hunting the line; he’d slipped it under the bed for later. He’d taken the stairs quick, grabbed his cap. He’d opened the door to his best friend, who leaned hard into the brick and held a match to the end of a pipe, his head cocked toward the dying sounds of the power looms being tooled across the street. Career wore his charcoal-colored sack jacket and his one too-big-for-him vest. The dust had been rubbed from the crease in his boots.

The two set off down Carleton, stepping through the pool of the hydrant’s wasted water and giving a nod to Mrs. May, leaning out her window—nosy as always and putting a gloss on the hairs of her chin.

“Your Ma all right?” Mrs. May calls.

“Had some rye,” William says. “Some tea.”

“It’s something,” Mrs. May says.

“Not enough.”

“You keep at it boy, you hear me?”

Her voice sounding like bad news, always, no matter how nice she tries to be.

Career wears his black hair long, past his ears. William wears his tucked inside his cap. Career walks straight, to make himself taller. William, tall, walks a crouch. More hydrants have gone off up and down—the spurt and the fizzle of water, free. The flangers, the fitters, the chippers, and caulkers are home. The patternmakers and carpenters. The iron molders and turners. The ones who make the boilers go. The casting cleaners and assistants. Not Pa. It’s visiting hours up at the penitentiary. Career always comes along. 

— excerpt, Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, illustrated by William Sulit

(New City Community Press/Temple University Press, April 30, 2013)

Read more...

a starred Kirkus review for Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent (and Beth drops to the floor in gratitude)

Years ago (it seems now) I wrote a book about Centennial Philadelphia—a novel about twin sisters of substantial means set against the Exposition that drew 10 million visitors to Philadelphia during 1876 and was endangered, on one incredibly hot day, by a greedy fire. Among my characters was a boy named William, making his way on the poor side of town. William rescued lost animals for a living. He rescued, in many ways, my grieving character, Katherine.

Dangerous Neighbors (Egmont USA/Laura Geringer Books) was originally told in three first-person voices—Katherine's, William's, and the fire's. Published, it was a single third-person telling, focused primarily on Katherine. I never lost sight of William, however. He was vital and alive to me and (I would read in review after review) to many Dangerous Neighbors readers as well.

I lost a major corporate account two years ago and found myself with the time (and desire) to return to William. I dialed back the clock by five years to 1871. I studied the sounds and the stresses of Baldwin Locomotive Works, Eastern State Penitentiary, Schuylkill River races, the odd medicines of the time (such as that sarsaparilla resolvent), and the neighborhood then known as Bush Hill. I gave William a best friend named Career, who worked for my idol, the Public Ledger editor George Childs, and I set the tale in motion. I rewrote this book dozens of times. I struggled with self-doubt, and that loneliness that sets in during the heat of making things.

Finally I asked my husband if he might illustrate the book and give me a cover. I wrote some jacket copy. I talked to Micah Kleit at Temple University Press. Micah and the Temple team had made Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River happen, and that book—odd, uncategorizable, a risk—has meant the world to me. William's story was also a risk, also a love song to my city. Micah, teaming me with Stephen Parks at New City Community Press, said (thankfully) yes. I asked Quinn Colter, a University of Chicago student with an eye on a copy editing career, if she might read the book looking for type errors. New City Community Press brought in a book designer named Elizabeth Parks, who was very kind (and talented).

And then the book was done and, for a very long time, I held my breath.

I exhaled last week, when Temple University Press's Gary Kramer, a publicist for whom I have enormous respect, sent me this starred review from Kirkus.

Dear Kirkus reviewer, whomever you are: I have no words. I am floored, and I am grateful.

Dr. Radway is due out on April 30th.

DR. RADWAY'S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT [STARRED REVIEW!]  
Kephart has crafted a deeply satisfying tale that’s richly evocative of its time and place.
Playing masterfully with words, knitting them into new and deliciously expressive forms, Kephart’s story is one of loss and then redemption. William Quinn is only 14. With his father in the Cherry Hill prison and his genially wayward older brother, Francis, recently beaten to death by a brutal policeman, his mother has ground herself into unbearable, paralyzing grief, and the boy has to find a way to save them both. He has help from many: Career, his cheerfully ambitious best friend; Pearl, a good-hearted prostitute; Molly, a neighbor child who’s deeply smitten with Career; a wayward goat named Daisy; and the abiding memory of Francis. Gradually, William finds a way to make right some terrible wrongs that are only revealed at a perfectly measured pace. Stark, spare illustrations provide an effective counterpoint to the flowing, poetic language. Against the 1871 Philadelphia setting (five years before the related Dangerous Neighbors, 2010), a faultlessly depicted world of sound, energy and ample filth, the fully developed characters of William and Career are trapped in a bleakly hopeless situation. But they never fully give up hoping. Like the very best of historical fiction, this effort combines a timeless tale with a vividly recreated, fascinating world.
An outstanding and ultimately life-affirming tale. (Historical fiction. 11 & up)

Read more...

a Philadelphia photo essay, in the Inquirer

The days are rarely what we imagine they will be. The news comes in. The shock. The losses. Ordinary days, as my friend Katrina Kenison has written, are, often, the greatest gifts of all.

One of the greatest gifts I've been given in recent months is the chance to write an occasional piece for the Inquirer—pieces about the city I unashamedly love. I don't write journalism, don't know how. I just write my heart. And I take my camera out there, too, because sometimes my lens writes the stories better than my handful of words.

This past weekend I was blessed by the publication of a photo essay about that part of Philadelphia once known as Bush Hill. I wrote about my travels through that area years ago and the revival of Eastern State Penitentiary.

You can write all you want, take whatever photos cross your path. It's nothing without an editor and a designer. And so today I thank Kevin Ferris and his team for the layout that they chose for the front page of this past Sunday's Currents section.

Read more...

Dangerous Neighbors (paperback) and Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent: two upcoming releases

In just a few days, Dangerous Neighbors, my Centennial Philadelphia novel, will be released by Egmont USA as a paperback, with a bound-in teacher's guide.  A few weeks after that, in mid-February, Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, an 1871 Philadelphia novel that features Dangerous Neighbors' own best-loved boy, William, will be released by New City Community Press/Temple University Press.

Dr. Radway's introduces, among many other Philadelphia places, Eastern State Penitentiary.  In this scene (below) William and his best friend, Career, are making their way toward the old prison, which was known back then as Cherry Hill.  They're going to keep William's father company, in the only way they know how.

The image above was taken two years ago, when I was in the midst of my research for this book.

Career pulls a stone out of his trouser pocket, drops it to the street, and kicks it ahead to William, who smacks it crosswise and up, stepping back to let two twin girls in dresses like pink parasols pass, their mother stern in blue.  Career lopes and knocks the stone to where William would be if he wasn’t still staring at the girls, both of them with the identical ginger hair and jewel eyes, neither somehow like the other.  Neither, mostly, like the mother, who casts her opinion on William and hurries her exotic procession along.  

William feels the heat in his face and runs for the stone.  He smacks it hard Career’s way.  The game stays good between them now—past Spring Garden and Brandywine, Green, Mt. Vernon, Wallace, all the way to Cherry Hill, where finally they stop and stand in the long skirt of the prison’s shadows, its massive gothic gloom.  Cherry Hill runs the full block and back, two-hundred feet in the east-west direction, four crenellated towers on its front face and a watchman high, looking for trouble. Career works another match into the shallow bowl of his pipe, and it takes.  The tobacco flares sweet. 

“You going to call to him, then?” Career asks, after a while.

“Walls too thick.”

“You going to try it anyway?”
            “Your whistling,” William says, “goes a longer way.”

Career blows the smoke of his pipe through the spaces between his teeth.  He clears his throat and finds his song, and it carries.  William closes his eyes and imagines his Pa inside—past the vaulted doors and the iron gates, beneath the eye of the warden, and of God.  People are puny at Cherry Hill.  People are locked away to consider what they’ve done.

“You think he can hear that?” Career asks now, stopping his song.

“Keep on.”

Career picks the song back up, and William stands there in the shadows, at his best friend’s side, trying to see Pa in his mind’s eye.   “Don’t do it, Pa,” Francis had warned him, Ma, mostly.  Don’t, don’t, don’t. 

Career whistles a professional melody.  William hears what he thinks is the wind, but it’s that bird winging in close, that dove tucking its wings then letting them go, its rise and its angling in effortless.  Career stops his song and looks up.  The bird goes on, north and west—a free line across the prison wall and out, toward the river.

Cherry Hill still locked up tight as a vault. 

Read more...

the 1871 Philadelphia novel moves into final design, and Dangerous Neighbors prompts an afternoon reverie

I returned from Asbury Park and Bruce Springsteen Appreciators to an email from Quinn Colter, a young friend destined for a big career as a copy editor.  I had invited Quinn to join the Dr. Radway editorial team, and she had—plying my text with wonderful questions and delightful commentary (it seems that Career, one of my primary characters, has won our Quinn Colter over).  Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, my 1871 Philadelphia novel about Bush Hill, Eastern State Penitentiary, Baldwin Locomotive Works, Schuylkill River races, George W. Childs, and two best friends, now goes into design and will be released next March by New City Community Press/Temple University Press.

I left the desk at last to take a walk.  Meandering through my streets, I discovered Kathleen, a very special green-eyed woman, who had, she told me, read Dangerous Neighbors a few weeks ago.  Kathleen grew up in Philadelphia at a time when circus elephants walked the streets of Erie and Broad, and in Dangerous Neighbors, a book about Philadelphia during the 1876 Centennial, she discovered many details that resonated with her.  Standing there in the glorious afternoon sun, Kathleen told me stories about the Oppenheimer curling iron, the fifteen-cent round-trip trolley, the ferry one took from Philadelphia across the Delaware, and the shore years ago.  Kathleen's grandmother was an eleven-year-old child during the time of the Centennial, and so Kathleen remembered, too, whispers of the great exposition.

I had published an essay about the Jersey shore in the Philadelphia Inquirer a few weeks ago, and that story prompted for Kathleen memories of her own trips to the sea as a child.  We spoke, then, of this, too—this shared geography that has been transformed by time and yet remains a signifier, a home.

As much as I often wish I were back in the city living the urban life, I am tremendously grateful for the streets where I live.  I am grateful, too, for the people who enter my life—for Quinn now on the verge of her career, and for Kathleen with her storehouse of memories.

Read more...

It's Official—and Cover Reveal: Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent

Many years ago I wrote an odd book called Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River.  Flow had grown out of my love for my city, was supported (in all its strangeness) by a Pew Fellowships in the Arts grant, and was published by the best possible house for a book such as that one:  Temple University Press.  Micah Kleit, my editor, gave the book room, while Gary Kramer, a savvy and delightful publicist with deep Philly roots, gave it wings.  Not so run-of-the-mill in tone, structure, and voice, but always Philly true, Flow sits today—slender and alive—on my shelves, thanks to Micah's picking up the phone when I called.

From Flow grew Dangerous Neighbors (Laura Geringer Books/Egmont USA), my 1876 Centennial novel.  Katherine, a bereaving twin, stands at the heart of that story, but just one step to her left is a character named William, a young man from the poor side of town who rescues lost animals for a living.  William was a character who never left my thoughts.  He lived with me long after Dangerous Neighbors ended.

Soon I was conjuring William as a young adolescent living among the machines of Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1871 Philadelphia.  His brother has been murdered by a cop (the murder based on a real Philadelphia event), his father is in Eastern State Penitentiary, and it is up to William to protect his heart-and-soul-sickened mom.  William gets some help in this from his best friend, Career, who has a job with the newspaper man, George Childs.  He gets help, too, from a prostitute named Pearl, and from the little girl next door.  He thinks he's getting help from the strange medicines (that sarsaparilla resolvent among them) that were being pedaled at the time.  And those ginger-haired twin girls from Dangerous Neighbors?  They're in and out of his poor neighborhood, thanks to their feminist mother.

After I'd finished writing this novel, I sat and thought for a time about publishing options.  I wanted a true Philadelphia home for this book.  I wanted an opportunity to work with a house that might connect this story to Philadelphia school children, museum goers, history buffs.   It wasn't long before I was writing a note to Micah at Temple University Press, who thought the story sounded interesting and encouraged me to send it on to his colleague, Stephen Parks.  Steve is a Syracuse University professor who also runs New City Community Press.  NCCP began as a literacy project in the public schools of Philadelphia, won a major national grant in support of its ethos, and remains today committed to telling community stories.  I liked the sound of all that, and so, last February, I met Steve in Chestnut Hill and we talked.  There's been no question (in my mind) about this book's future ever since.

Today I can officially announce that Dr. Radway's Sarsparilla Resolvent will be released next March from New City Community Press and distributed by my friends at Temple University Press.  It will be illustrated by my husband, William Sulit, who also designed the book's cover, revealed for the first time here; for a glimpse of interior art, go here and for more of Bill's art, go here.  In January, Egmont USA will release the paperback of Dangerous Neighbors, with my teacher's guide bound in (the starred PW review of Dangerous Neighbors can be found here.).  It is my great hope, then, that the two books will make their way into the homes and hearts of Philadelphians and others.  There are some other fun developments in regards to this project, but I will save them for later.  For now, my great thanks to Micah, to Steve, to Gary, to Egmont USA for the paperback, and to Amy Rennert, my agent, for stitching the innumerable parts of my crazy dreams together.

Read more...

Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent: A Partial Cover Reveal

I've worked with my artist husband on two previous books—Ghosts in the Garden (New World Library) and Zenobia: The Curious Book of Business (Berrett-Koehler).  This past year, we've been collaborating on a third—Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, an illustrated teen novel that features Philadelphia's own Baldwin Locomotive Works, Eastern State Penitentiary, the great Schuylkill River, a blowzy named Pearl, and my hero George Childs, among other places and souls.  It features, as well, the odd tonics and medicines of the time—the strange promises and possible powers of herbal concoctions and flowering vines.  William of Dangerous Neighbors fame stands at the center of this novel.  Two twins waft through.

This morning, my husband has completed the design of the book's cover (he has also created nearly a dozen interior illustrations), and while I cannot unveil the whole, I am happy to share this small corner of an image that perfectly captures 1871 and, at the same time, suggests the story's very modern spirit. 

I am ridiculously happy about all of this.  Not just that the book will exist (spring 2013).  But that my fictional William was rendered by my real-life William, and that a very kind press is giving both a home.

Read more...

Preparing Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent for Publication

Less than a year from now, Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, the 1871 prequel to Dangerous Neighbors, will make its way into the world.  This is William's story; this is his world, Bush Hill.  Look for more here on the particulars in a few weeks.

But before any book can go out into the world, it has to be a book we love.  It had been a while since I'd read the "final" book through, and as I did (a few days ago) I felt uneasy.  Work needed to be done.  I wanted to do it.  And so, today, my travels finally done, I am at work on the story—rebuilding its opening pages to heighten tension and momentum, deepening a character I named Career, and revisiting my notes on Eastern State Penitentiary, where much of the story takes place.

This is a photo of the room about which I write, taken a year or so ago.

Read more...

Talking about William from Dangerous Neighbors

For much of last year I worked on a book that took me deep inside the world of 1871 Philadelphia—the clank of Baldwin machines, the boats on the Schuylkill, the innards of Eastern State Penitentiary, the rattle of a newsroom, the world of William, first introduced in Dangerous Neighbors.

I wrote a book.  My husband made drawings.  And then I stood back and thought.  What next?

Today I am having a preliminary meeting about this book of mine, this character I love, this Philadelphia to which I will always be true.  I don't know what will happen, but I do know this:  Sometimes we have to step away to know what it is we should be stepping toward.

Read more...